Fertile ground for population crisis

You’d be wrong to think plunging birth rates will help the planet. Fewer babies create other issues, like who will care for the elderly or pay into pensions?

Acompany in Japan has announced it is to stop making nappies for babies and will instead concentrate solely on producing them for the elderly. Could something like this eventually happen here in Ireland? You bet it could. Japan is the most rapidly ageing society in the world. Its fertility rate has been well below replacement level for decades. Retired people far outnumber children, and this is only going to get worse. The Japanese economy has been stagnant for a long time now and the national debt keeps rising.

The Lancet medical journal published a report earlier this month looking at future demographic trends.

It predicts that by the end of the century the population of the planet will begin to shrink for the first time since the Black Death in the Middle Ages. This time the decline will be caused not by a gigantic pandemic, worse by orders of magnitude than Covid-19, but by the fact that we are having so few babies, and this trend is taking hold basically everywhere outside of sub-Saharan Africa.

To keep your population at an even level, without immigration, couples need to have 2.1 children on average each. This allows for some children not reaching adulthood.

Ireland’s fertility rate has already been below replacement level for quite some time, but not by too much.

The Lancet report predicts that it will have dropped to 1.54 by midcentury. The prediction is way off. It was out of date even before the report was published. According to new data from Eurostat, we hit 1.54 in 2022, that is, 28 years early.

If it is 1.54 now, what will it really be in 2050? Will we have hit Spanish levels by then, which is currently at barely one child per couple?

This is why the prospect of us eventually buying more nappies for the elderly than for babies is not as farfetched as it seems. Maybe we will get there by the end of the century, although if our fertility rate continues its present rate of decline, we could arrive at that point a good bit before then.

What do you think about this prospect? Maybe you think it won’t affect you, but unless you are long retired, it’s going to affect you – and very much so.

If you are 50 now, you probably have another 35 or so years of life ahead of you. When you are retired you will be part of a very big and growing age cohort. Who is going to look after you in your very old age, assuming your health hasn’t declined too much before then?

Will your children do so? It was easier to expect this when the average couple had four or so children. But when we have only two or less, is it really fair to expect them to spend a lot of time looking after us when they have their own lives to be getting on with?

Maybe our carers will be migrants. That is already the case for lots of elderly people. They go into the homes of the elderly to keep an eye on them. They work in our nursing homes and in our hospitals. This will certainly help, but not indefinitely because the countries many of these carers are coming from are also starting to age.

This will happen last in sub-Saharan Africa, but Irish nursing homes will face lots and lots of competition for African carers from the rest of Europe. There is going to be a severe shortage of carers in the future. That is guaranteed.

And who is going to pay for the pension system, and our hospital bills? How sustainable will private health insurance be when its funding model is based on there being more young people than old people? When there are more of the latter than the former, then the cost of private health cover will become so prohibitive few will be able to afford it.

Can state pension schemes be sustained? What will private pensions be worth? These increase in value over and above the contributions put in, thanks to economic growth. But if your economy stagnates, as in Japan because there are so many old people, what then?

And consider the cost of our health system to the taxpayer right now; €23bn per annum and rising. What will it be when many more people are aged over 65?

If you’re a hardcore environmentalist, you might even welcome the prospect of what is to come. You might

It would be some irony if we averted an environmental crisis by causing a demographic one

think that a declining population will help the planet and therefore is worth the huge human cost. I’m not sure what to say about that, except that it seems anti-human.

In any case, if our economies decarbonise — as is the aim — then the present environmental harm caused by billions of human beings will abate. A sensible environmentalist ought to support something like a fertility rate of 2.1 children per couple so as to avoid a total demographic catastrophe. It would be some irony if we averted an environmental crisis by helping to cause a demographic one.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, all the “Great and the Good” were worried about something they called the “population bomb”. They said we needed to get population growth under control and that’s why China launched its one-child policy and India also introduced aggressive population control measures.

In the 1970s, experts like Paul Ehrlich predicted that the race to feed the world’s fast-growing population was already lost and hundreds of millions were certain to die of starvation. He was completely wrong about that. The “population bomb” never exploded and fertility rates tend to drop on their own anyway, without the need for massive state intervention. But the coming population implosion is certain to happen. It is already baked in.

Young Japanese couples, for example, would need to have big families to stabilise what is currently taking place there and they are doing the opposite.

Ireland is ageing less fast than most other European countries, but we are getting there. Despite this, the problem is almost completely absent from public and political discourse. When is the last time you heard a minister say he or she is worried about our falling fertility rate and what they think might be done about it? What plans are they putting in place to cope?

They talk an awful lot about the environmental crisis. But they never talk about the coming demographic one. They ought to. They need to be asked their opinion because it’s going to affect us all, and badly.